This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  Max sighed heavily. “Nothing would make me happier than having fifteen grand in my pocket to give you.”

  “Not give, loan,” Jeremy interjected.

  “Whatever, doesn’t matter either way, I’m broke.” He peered with dolorous eyes over the rim of his teacup, momentarily sincere. “Really, Jeremy, I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

  Jeremy watched his brilliant proposal whisked suddenly away, like a newspaper caught in a strong wind. “You’re broke? What happened to all that money you got in the divorce from Katya?”

  “There wasn’t as much as you’d think. She had good lawyers. And I made some bad investments. Tried my hand at day-trading. Not a wise idea, it turned out.”

  “I always figured you kept your money in a Swiss bank or tucked in a mattress.”

  Max grunted. “I sleep on a futon now.” He sighed deeply, wiped the last curds of egg from his whiskers, and put the napkin on the table. “I’m going to have to find myself another rich wife one of these days.”

  “Now that’s a healthy approach.” Jeremy hunched over and shoveled the last crumbs of crust into his mouth, unwilling to meet his father’s gaze. He felt petulant, against his own will and better judgment: He’d never asked much of his father, not when Max divorced Jillian and took off for that commune when Jeremy was only four; nor when Jillian died and Max could only make it back from Norway for two days for the funeral. Really, he’d been a goddamn saint, considering his father’s neglect. And now he’d finally used his get-out-of-jail-free card, asked this one favor, and Max couldn’t help him? Jeremy felt all those years of resentment flooding back—once again, he was the fourteen-year-old kid who had only distaste for the absentee dad who dropped in once every year or two with a backpack full of Free Mumia lapel pins or a custom-painted didgeridoo. Jeremy had thought he was over all that—that as an adult he’d finally gotten past the obvious Freudian abandonment hoo-ha and could actually admire his father’s genial self-assurance and blunt honesty and generally haphazard approach to life. He sometimes even recognized how some of these traits had been passed through the chains of DNA into his own personality (and certainly this was a result of nature, not nurture, since his father had done almost no nurturing at all). Not now. Now he just wanted to slug him.

  “Don’t you judge me, kiddo. I’m the most content person you know. I’m doing just fine,” Max said. “Your generation has such angst. We didn’t worry about this kind of stuff. Mortgages! Retirement accounts! Therapy! Everyone in therapy. Talking talking talking and never doing.

  How old are you—thirty-three now? Thirty-four? When I was your age, I was living with two women and a pet lion on a farm in upstate New York. I was blissfully happy.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about the lion before, Dad. It’s a harder world these days. A lot more ways to fuck things up.”

  “Bullshit, Jeremy. Youth is timeless. You’re only as old as you think you are, no matter what year it may be.” Max stood, extricating a pouch of rolling tobacco from the thready back pocket of his corduroys. “Instead of running around trying to go even more deeply into debt than you already are, why don’t you just lose the house?”

  “Lose the house?” Jeremy imagined driving up to their front door only to find the house gone, vanished, aimlessly wandered off to a suburb in Arizona, with only the exposed cement foundation marking the fact that someone had once lived a life there.

  “Sell it. Get rid of it, and then you and Claudia go jaunt around the world a bit, act like the kids you are. Live the moment.”

  Jeremy considered this in silence, stunned that he hadn’t considered this obvious solution earlier. “Well, thanks for the fatherly wisdom,” he finally muttered, but he was speaking to his father’s back: Max was shuffling down the patio stairs and out into the sun. Jeremy watched as his father bent his craggy head over the cigarette in his hand and then exhaled a long, satisfied plume of smoke toward the bright midday sky. He found himself thinking, unexpectedly, how much Aoki would like his father. And also that, for once, his father had actually had a pretty good idea.

  “Sell it?” Claudia stood in the living room with sandpaper in her hands from where she was attempting to patch the crack above the mantel. White plaster dust clung to her curls and settled in the hollows under her eyes, like the mask of a Kabuki performer. She’d covered the furniture in plastic sheeting, and the shrouded living room resembled a morgue, each amorphous lump a corpse waiting for identification. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

  Jeremy roamed about the room, ping-ponging from side to side, incapable of concealing his excitement. “This is pretty extreme, Claudia. We should get out now, before it’s too late. Think of all the things we could do if we did!”

  Claudia cupped the folded sandpaper in her palm. “Things like what?”

  “We could travel around the world. Or move—say, to Barcelona! You’d love it there, all the great food and the music and the bars. And it’s cheap! You’ll write a new screenplay and I’ll come up with a bunch of new songs to finish the album, and we’ll bartend to pay the bills or something.” This new plan that he’d hatched on the drive home sounded thrilling when spoken out loud. He imagined them unmooring themselves from this anchor of a house—this mistake they had clearly made—and drifting off to somewhere far less bounded by rules.

  Claudia stared at him, perplexed. “You want to bartend? In Barcelona?”

  “Doesn’t it sound like more fun than being destitute here?”

  She moved to the wall and slowly smoothed a hand across the spackle-filled fissure, checking the texture. “I don’t know,” she said, not looking at him. “It doesn’t sound very realistic.”

  “OK. Fine.” He couldn’t prevent the peevishness that had crept into his voice. Didn’t she realize that they were in danger of sinking with this house, becoming the buttoned-up people they’d always said they wouldn’t be, just to save it? He summoned his backup reserve: “How about this: We sell the house and move into a cheaper rental.”

  Her voice was dry and hoarse. “I don’t want to give up just like that. This is the moment when we’re supposed to step up and fight. This is our house we’re talking about.”

  “It’s just a house.”

  “Let’s discuss this rationally,” Claudia began slowly, and he could tell by how carefully she articulated the words that she was trying to conceal her frustration, trying not to start a fight, trying in all likelihood not to annoy him more than she could tell he was already annoyed. Aoki used to scream at Jeremy for nothing at all—for buying the wrong ice cream flavor; for noticing a cute girl on the street—and their relationship had been defined by the totemic battles that were followed by explosive make-up sessions; in three years of marriage to Claudia, on the other hand, they had fought maybe a half-dozen times, always in a half-assed “I can understand where you’re coming from but” kind of way. For a moment, he resented her for pandering to him like that, for being so sympathetic all the time. Sometimes Jeremy was acutely aware of how much Claudia adored him and how much he wished that she didn’t: Not that he wanted her to stop loving him, just that it would be good for her to hate him a bit too. He didn’t deserve unequivocal infatuation. Sometimes he just wanted her to scream at him, tell him what a shithead he was, but she never did.

  “I am being rational. The bank plans to take it anyway, right? So where are we going to get the money to stop them, Claudia? Where? Because I don’t think we can grow it in the vegetable garden.” He stepped in closer. “I asked my father if we could borrow some money, you know.”

  “You did?” She peered into his face, trying to read what was written just under the surface. Up this close, he could smell wine on her breath. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s what you were going to do?”

  He shrugged. “It didn’t make any difference. He’s broke.”

  Disappointment flickered across her face and vanished. “I guess I know where the Let’s move to Barcelona idea came from, then. I can’t say I really wante
d to be in debt to your father anyway.”

  “Well, I thought it was a novel approach,” he said. “It was certainly the path of least resistance. Maybe we could ask your parents?”

  Claudia gave him a weary look. “My parents make a religion out of clipping coupons and hitting the free-sample tables at Costco, remember? They’ve been meticulously planning their retirement for years. I doubt they want to spend tens of thousands of dollars bailing out their irresponsible daughter.”

  “It was just an idea.”

  Claudia brushed hair out of her face with the back of her hand, releasing a shower of pixie dust to the floor, and then sat heavily on the couch. “We need to talk, Jeremy. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Tamra said. About being realistic about our financial situation. About starting to act like grown-ups.”

  Jeremy sat down on the edge of the armchair across from her, dreading where this was going. “Define grown-up?” He threw in a smile, hoping to lift the heaviness he felt descending on the room.

  Claudia threw him a baleful look. “Look. We got ourselves into this mess because we acted like silly children, jumping in headfirst without a good backup plan. We’ve been waiting for our ship to come in for three years now, but you know what? I’m not sure it’s coming anymore. We’re stuck. Did you notice that the house down the street has been on the market for six months now? And it’s nicer than ours. The real estate market is in free fall and we probably couldn’t sell this place quickly if we tried, let alone get what we paid for it in the first place.”

  “So we declare bankruptcy. Or just walk away. Why not?”

  “Because,” she said, and he was alarmed to realize that her eyes were starting to pink over with tears, “I just can’t fail like that. Think about it. I already lost my movie—and now the house, too? And what, we just tell our friends and our families that oops, we were stupid? We screwed up but hey, it’s not our problem, we’re just walking away? It’s too humiliating.” She rubbed at her watering eye with a dirty hand, succeeding only in transferring plaster dust to her cornea. Her left eye blinked convulsively with irritation. “Look, I’m just not ready to give up on our life. This”—and she gestured at the room around them—“we made this. Together. If we give it up now, what if we never have another chance again? What if this is the apex of our lives and it’s all downhill from here?”

  Jeremy couldn’t stand to see her cry or, even less, to be the one making her cry. “OK, OK,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. “Don’t cry. I was just trying to find the path of least resistance. Make it easier on us.”

  “There is no path of least resistance, Jeremy. Our best bet is to buckle down and dig ourselves out like responsible adults. And if that means making some sacrifices, so be it.”

  “So I guess this means you’re not interested in a pet lion, then,” Jeremy muttered, not liking this talk of sacrifices at all.

  “A what?” Her voice was larded with impatience. He thought of his father’s words—S for square—as he tasted dust in the back of his throat.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “Can you be serious for just a second?” She took a deep breath. “First, I took out an ad for a roommate this afternoon, on Craigslist. The way I see it, we can rent the spare bedroom out for at least eight hundred dollars a month, which means we only have to come up with another fourteen hundred to cover the mortgage. Plus a few grand to cover the payments we missed already.”

  Jeremy was nauseated. “A roommate? You want a stranger to live with us?”

  Claudia offered him an apologetic look. “It doesn’t have to be forever. Just until we get back on our feet.”

  “But you use that room as your office!”

  Claudia jumped up and turned back to the crack. She stood in front of it with her hands on her hips, as if challenging it to break open again, and then attacked the spackle with renewed aggression. “Yeah, about that.” Her voice was low and congested. “I think the other thing we have to face is that my career is not going as planned. My film tanked, Carter doesn’t return my calls—he’s basically dropped me as a client—and, let’s be honest, I’m probably not going to get another directing job for a while.”

  “That’s not true,” he protested. Her casual self-indictment made him ill. This was not the Claudia he liked the most, the woman who had breathtakingly summoned Spare Parts into being by sheer force of will, the woman who stayed up late at night watching the director commentary tracks on Criterion Collection classic film DVDs and reading cinephile magazines with titles like American Cinematographer and Cineaste. Or maybe—he thought with surprise—it was; wasn’t this approach to their foreclosure just a variation on the same stubborn nose-to-the-ground determination? Less inspired artistic vision than tortoise-like perseverance? “Of course you’re going to make another movie.”

  “Not unless I take Carter’s advice and start writing wedding movies.”

  Jeremy winced. “You just have to keep trying.”

  “Actually, for the time being I think I need to stop trying. Take a break, for my own sanity.” The muscles of Claudia’s shoulders flexed and strained as she scraped away the last rough nubs of spackle and then stood back to survey her handiwork. The crack had been erased, leaving just a faint ghost behind as a reminder.

  “Take a break?” He couldn’t make sense of this. “Claudia, look at me. You do not take a break from your dreams.” He knew that sounded like a daytime talk-show cliché—this also, he realized, sounded like something Jillian might say—but in this moment, the sentiment seemed vital. It was of critical importance that she not step away from the person he wanted her to be.

  She whirled around. The whites of her eyes were veined and with the ashen dust caked in the cracks of her face she looked ten years older. Frazzled and defeated. Frighteningly—and this was the first time he had ever had this thought—she looked kind of like her mother, Ruth, a sweet, sagging woman with a penchant for animal appliqué sweatshirts. “It’s not like I’m going to stop trying altogether, but”—she hesitated—“I took a full-time job today, Jeremy. As a high school teacher. At Esme’s mom’s school. The money’s not great but it’ll be enough. And I can still write scripts at night. I’ll do it for a year and then see where we’re at. Or maybe you’ll finish your album and be able to pay the mortgage yourself and it will become a non-issue.”

  Her words flopped onto the floor, a sodden lump. Jeremy stood regarding them balefully. “You did all this without even asking me.” His words came out colder than he intended them to; colder than her proposal merited, probably, but he felt compelled to punish her anyway, for some grievance he couldn’t quite name. “You just gave up on everything we always said we wanted for ourselves. For four stupid walls—that are crumbling, by the way, despite all your work—and a wooden floor.”

  “I’m doing this to save what we said we wanted for ourselves.”

  “Are we even talking about the same thing?”

  Claudia violently kicked her work clogs off, sending them skittering across the dusty floor to land against the plastic-covered television set. She turned to look at him with fury distorting her face, rendering her unrecognizable. It stopped him cold. “Look, Jeremy. Someone’s got to step up to the plate.” She spat the words at him. “And since you don’t seem interested in doing it, I will.”

  “This whole thing is your fault. You talked me into this house in the first place. It wasn’t my idea. We never should have bought it.” Jeremy realized he was whining. “I should have trusted my gut!”

  Claudia’s voice ascended to a pitch he had never heard before, a glass-endangering vibrato. “Your gut? Well, Mr. King of Hindsight, your gut never spoke up about its concerns when we were house-shopping, so, too late. Your gut failed to pay the last two mortgage bills! It’s so much easier to blame anyone but yourself, isn’t it? Take some responsibility!”

  Jeremy sat down heavily on the chair. He would have laughed at the weirdness of this moment—they w
ere fighting—if it wasn’t so traumatic. He hated the sound of Claudia’s raised voice after all, and now the only way he could think to stop it was to play on her sympathies and act the part of the wounded party. “I’m just hurt that you didn’t include me in your decision-making,” he said, lowering his voice. “You don’t care what I think at all. Christ, Claudia, you advertised for a roommate without asking me?”

  It worked. Claudia stared at him, breathing hard and visibly deflating. “Of course I care. Look, I’m sorry. I just didn’t think we had a choice.” She sighed and swiped at the dust on her face, leaving long finger marks that revealed dark crescents of exhaustion ringing her eyes. “This whole thing has taken a lot out of me. I think I need a nap. Maybe you do too.”

  Jeremy wondered if there was an intimation in this statement, but the prickly expression on her face suggested a desert without an oasis. “No,” he said, cranky. “I’m going to watch TV.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom. Jeremy sat down on the couch, translucent plastic sheeting crinkling under his rear. He picked up the remote and turned on the television set, not even bothering to remove the plastic, and watched the watery images that swam through with halfhearted interest. Inside him, fury and guilt engaged in a heated skirmish, one side hating Claudia for popping his bubble and the other reminding him of his old promise to take care of her. Was her proposal really so awful? Yes; one side brandished its bayonets. You’ll survive, parried the other.

  After a minute, he snapped the set off. He picked up his guitar, played a few chords, then put it down again. Finally, he tiptoed to the door of the bedroom and stood there, staring at Claudia. She had taken her work clothes off and was asleep, facedown on top of the bedspread, wearing a T-shirt and a faded pair of his boxer shorts. A small puddle of drool darkened the pillow.

  Jeremy closed the door and went back to the living room, where he opened his laptop. The computer whirred drowsily; the desktop photograph of a chubby five-year-old Claudia sparked up and spread across the screen. She stared at him curiously from across the years, skeptical of the person looking back, unconcerned about the melted orange popsicle smeared across her face.